In recent years, along with the rapid spread and development of multimedia technology, there has been a surge in multimedia products. These products are treated as commodities to be bought and sold between product providers and product users as important content. Along with the increasing complexity and diversity of products, the copyrights for the products have become complex and diverse in type. Management of such copyrights has become difficult. How to deal with infringement of copyrights due to use of a product without authorization of the product provider is also becoming complex.
In view of this situation, copyright information management has in the past been achieved through protection by copyright associations set up for individual product media. That is, these copyright associations separately managed the corresponding products information and protected copyrights using that information. The products to be protected were in the most part so-called analog content.
There have been the following problems under the above-mentioned technical background:
The mechanisms for management of copyright information in the past were not designed for the purpose of supporting the distribution of products between product providers and product users. Therefore, it was difficult to search for, e.g., products required by product users. Even if a required product was found by some method etc., it was not possible to know the handling of the copyright information or the licensing conditions and other matters relating to that product. In the end, there was the problem that transactions of the product could not be successfully completed. This in turn led to copyright infringement.
On the other hand, looking at the problem of copyright infringement, the development of multimedia technology, in particular the spectacular spread of the Internet, has led to a sharp rise in the amount of digitalized multimedia content, that is, digital content. The percent of this in all products has become greater. In today's world, where replication of products has become easy, there is therefore the problem that it is difficult to prove illicit use of products.
Further, the environment behind the distribution of products has changed dramatically. Under the current situation, where products consisting of digital content are flooding in the Internet, management and protection of copyrights are becoming increasingly difficult.
In addition to this, copyright laws are being amended to strengthen protection of copyrights. With the environment surrounding copyrights thus dramatically changing, it is urgent to construct a system which reliably manages and protects copyrights.